CAMBRIDGE – Despite the recent upturn in some of its member countries, the eurozone’s economy remains in the doldrums, with the overall rate of annual GDP growth this year likely to be only slightly higher than 1%. Even Germany’s growth rate is below 2%, while GDP is still declining in France, Italy, and Spain. And this slow rate of growth has kept the eurozone’s total unemployment rate at a painfully high12%.Slow growth and high unemployment are not the eurozone’s only problems. The annual inflation rate, at just0.5%, is now so close to zero that even a minor shock could push it into negative territory and trigger a downward price spiral. Deflation would weaken aggregate demand by raising the real (inflation-adjusted) value of household and corporate debt, and by increasing real interest rates. Lower demand could, in turn, cause the fall in prices to accelerate, sending prices into a dangerous tailspin.There are few if any panaceas in economics. But a sharp decline in the euro’s exchange rate – say, by 15% – would remedy many of the eurozone’s current economic problems. A weaker euro would raise the cost of imports and the potential prices of exports, thus pushing up the eurozone’s overall inflation rate. Devaluation would also boost average eurozone GDP growth by stimulating exports and encouraging Europeans to substitute domestically produced goods and services for imported items. Although competitiveness within the eurozone would be unaffected, a weaker euro would significantly improve the external balance with the rest of the world, which accounts for about half of eurozone trade.European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has emphasized his concern that the euro’s rise over the past three years has increased the risk of deflation. But it was his famous declaration in July 2012 that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro that, while successful in reducing interest rates in the distressed countries of the eurozone periphery, also contributed to the euro’s current strength.Today, neither Draghi’s recent statements nor the prospect of an American-style program of large-scale asset purchases (also known as quantitative easing) has caused the euro to weaken or the inflation rate to move back toward the target level of 2%. So the operative question is how to reduce the euro’s relative value while maintaining the perception of stability that Draghi helped to establish in 2012.Because quantitative easing by the ECB has been advocated as a way to weaken the euro, it is worthwhile to examine the impact of its use by the Federal Reserve on the value of the dollar and the inflation rate in the United States.The short answer is that it did very little to affect either.The real trade-weighted value of the dollar is now at the same level that it was in 2007, before the onset of the Great Recession. It rose briefly during the peak crisis year of 2008, as global investors sought the safe haven of dollar-denominated assets, but retreated during 2009 to its previous level. The dollar’s value then remained relatively stable during more than three years of quantitative easing – and actually rose during 2013, when the Fed’s asset purchases reached a high of more than $1 trillion.Of course, other factors influenced the dollar’s value during this period as well. Nonetheless, the behavior of the dollar’s exchange rate during the period of quantitative easing offers no support for the proposed use of large-scale asset purchases by the ECB as a way to bring about euro depreciation.The Fed’s quantitative easing also did not cause an increase in the rate of inflation.The consumer price index rose by 1.6% in 2010, when quantitative easing began, then increased somewhat faster in 2011 and 2012, before dropping back to a gain of just 1.5% in 2013, the peak year for asset purchases.If the ECB wants to reduce the value of the euro and increase the eurozone’s near-term inflation rate, the only reliable way to do so may be by direct intervention in the currency market – that is, selling euros and buying a basket of other currencies.While direct intervention to weaken the euro would create challenges in other parts of the world, policymakers in the US and elsewhere should recognize the importance of a more competitive euro to the future of the European economy.Martin Feldstein, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, chaired President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. In 2006, he was appointed to President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and, in 2009, was appointed to President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Currently, he is on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Group of 30, a non-profit, international body that seeks greater understanding of global economic issues.

Britain should leave the EU if Europe's judges trample on our basic protections

The ECJ is a force to be reckoned with, or preferably kept at a very safe sovereign distance

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

8:44PM BST 30 Apr 2014

Leaked documents from the Banque de France in 2009 revealed that Paris is explicitly trying break London’s grip on the clearing house business by using regulatory controlPhoto: Reuters

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The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has come close to destroying the last good reason for Britain to stay in the European Union. Judges in Luxembourg seem no longer willing to uphold the integrity of the EU single market. Or rather, they seem complicit in subverting it.

Stripping away a veneer of technicalities, the ECJ has signalled in a test ruling on the Financial Transaction Tax that it will not defend the City of London against assault by eurozone states, who are determined to muscle through their economic ideology, even when in breach of the "Four Freedoms" that have always underpinned the European Project. One of them is free movement of capital within the EU.

"They are playing with fire," said Mats Persson, from Open Europe, a body that has been warning for months that this case is a watershed moment for Britain's future in Europe.

The judges could hardly have acted with more explosive effect in the insurrectional climate gripping the UK, justthree weeks before the electoral reckoning in late May.It is a gift for UKIP's Nigel Farage, his party already leading both Labour and the Tories at 31pc - and soon to have far too many euro MPs to fit in its favourite little dining room at la Tête de Lard in Strasbourg. How many times must Britain must be "kicked in the teeth by the ECJ", he asked, before we all agree that enough is enough?

The case is not about the rights and wrongs of this so-called Tobin Tax, which levies a 0.1pcfee on sales of stocks and 0.01pc on derivatives. "It is a matter of whether Britain can still trust the ECJ to uphold the single market. There are other cases pending that may be even more important," said Mr Persson.

The unspoken rule of the EU game is that no state - or no large state, with my apologies to Ireland, Cyprus and others looking bruised lately - should ever be steamrollered on a vital national interest, or in a sector where it is the EU's leading player. Germany must always be treated with care on the auto industry, France on agriculture and Britain on the nexus of banking, insurance, and finance that we call the City - unloved though it is, though I fail to see the superior morality of selling big cars to Russian oligarchs, or undercutting African farmers with subsidised EU grain. That rule has been violated since the Lehman crisis. There has been a systematic squeeze on the City, driven in part by emotional spasms and by the urge to blame the rolling financial cataclysms since 2008 on the immediately visible agents of crisis rather than the deeper causes - excess world savings that must go into bubbles, the structure of globalisation and the inherent failings of monetary union. Three EU agencies have been created with binding powers over banking, insurance and markets, able to override a British veto in extremis. The Coalition signedthese bodies into EU law shortly after taking power, seemingly unaware of what they meant. This triple-headed Hydra strips Westminster of final control over regulation of the City for the first time in 300 years. The shift in power was masked at first by assurances that Britain would retain "operational" control. The edifice of single market law supposedly stood guard as guarantor. That mask has fallen away.In January the ECJ threw out Britain's effort to stop the EU gaining powers to impose bans on "shorting" stocks, a dispute over the locus of control rather than the merits of "shorting". Now it has thrown out Britain's effort to stop a vanguard of 11 EU states imposing a Tobin Tax that can levy fees by extra-terratorial fiat on trades in London if one party is based in Euroland. That means a derivative trade by Citigroup with Deutsche Bank (with its trading hub and 8,500 staff in London) would be caught in the net. The ECJ's arguments are complex. It says the UK's challenge is premature since theEU-11have not yet reached final agreement on the Tobin Tax, yet it dodged the issue of extra-territoriality and implicitly endorsed the principle that these states may deploy the EU's new mechanism of "enhanced cooperation" in this astonishing fashion. The stakes are high.Roughly 40pc of global derivatives trades take place in London, and 75pc of Europe's trades. The worldwide market is $668 trillion in notional contracts, mostly interest rate and currency swaps. Bank of England data show that turnover in Britain is almost $4 trillion a day. The head of derivatives trading at one of the City's biggest banks said his team already has plans to switch everything to Singapore within 48 hours if the Tobin Tax ever comes. The tax is gesture politics. Sweden's experiment in the 1980s had to be abandoned. It lowers net government revenue in the end by driving away business and eroding the tax base. France's Financial Markets Association said the recent trial run has been a fiasco, eating into volume and threatening the viability of Paris as a financial centre. Athanasios Orphanides, a former European Central Bank governor, told The Telegraph last year that Britain would be left at the mercy of hostile forces if it left the EU. "It would be catastrophic. The UK would lose the protection it currently enjoys as the eurozone's major financial center," he said. His point was that Britain is ideally placed within the EU but outside the quagmire of monetary union. It retains full access to the Single Market, with all its legal defences. Once post-Brexit the UK would have no way of stopping an onslaught of regulations aimed at forcing banks and fund managers to decamp to the eurozone. He warned that the ECB is already clamping down on payments and settlement systems conducted in euros outside its jurisdiction. Yet if the ECJ sweeps aside that single market defence regardless - with no appeal possible - nothing remains.The EU is then an arbitrary power without a rule of law. There is no longer much to be lost from leaving. Britain might as well break free, reverting to its historic vocation as a global trading hub.

My working assumption on Brexit has always been the EU would not in fact retaliate on trade, if it can hold together at all. The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain and France would for various reasons seek to reach a new modus vivendi, ensuring that commerce scarcely missed a beat. Foreign policy and military ties would carry on as before. I doubt in any case that monetary union can ever be made to function properly, so the issue of ECB oversight will be overtaken by events in the end. Be that as it may, we will find out soon whether the ECJ intends to throw out a UK Treasury case in 2011 challenging the European Central Bank's powers to stop clearing houses such LCH Clearnet being forced to relocate part of their business from London to eurozone hubs.Leaked documents from the Banque de France in 2009revealed that Paris is explicitly trying break London’s grip on the clearing house business by using regulatory control. Nobody should be too shocked if the ECJ is taking sides in this guerilla warfare.My own dealings with the body a decadeago coveringthree free speech cases - Bernard Connolly, Marta Andreasen and Hans-Martin Tillack - led me to conclude that the ECJ is a rubber-stamp for executive power, a reflexive enforcer of the European Project. The Advocate-General in the Connolly case even cited legal blasphemy codes as grounds for legitimately suppressing criticism of the EU, suggesting that a whistleblower book revealing abuses in Brussels was comparable in villainy to a pornographic video depicting St Teresa of Avila. The ECJ has since become more powerful, extending its jurisdiction from EU Community law (essentially commerce) to the much broader realm of Union law with the Lisbon Treaty.It is a force to be reckoned with, or preferably kept at a very safe sovereign distance. The judges have shown their colours in twopivotal rulings this year. Three strikes and surely we're out.

“This difference between the parliament and those who take the real decisions is very clear to the citizens.”

The words of Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, delivered in a recent interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, are simultaneously infuriating and true. They also go right to the main issue in EU politics ahead of this month’s elections to the European Parliament: where does real power lie? With the parliament or, as in the past, with the European Council – the heads of state and government – just as Mr Van Rompuy so succinctly put it?

The biggest irony of the EU is that with every new treaty the formal powers of parliament have increased, yet in reality the council is becoming ever stronger.The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has also lost power and standing. This power shift raisesthreequestions: why did it happen; does it matter; and is it reversible?

So why did it happen? The formal answer is bad luck. The eurozone crisis was thedominating event of the pastfive years. The European treaties did not empower the EU’s institutions to do anything relevant, such as create new mechanisms or replace unworkable rules with new ones. The council was left to fill this power vacuum by default. It set up the European Stability Mechanism “outside the treaty”, as it is known in the Brussels jargon. This means the ESM is not a formal EU institution. Its legal basis is a separate treaty between countries. Banking unionis another example. Some of it is inside the treaty, some of it outside.

This formal explanation is misleading, however. Real power is not formal power. In the past the commission was at its most powerful when it led the big debates. It did so in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the run-up to the Maastricht treaty, which set the basis for the euro. The commission was then not empowered by law. It just did it. Its main role was to provide political leadership when no one else did. It succeeded because it sought allies. The failure over the pastfive years has been intellectual. When crisis struck, Europe’s institutions were off-script. I recall meeting a senior EU official right after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. His main concern was the impact of any bank rescue package on European competition policy. He did not even think about deposit insurance or joint supervision. Nor did he have any contingency plans in his drawers. Does it matter? I think so. The council has proved more flexible in the crisis than I expected, but it has fallen well short of what it needed to do. All it did was to agree the minimum required to keep the show on the road. A voter backlash against this amorphous political cloud called Brussels should not be surprising. Voters do not care about inter-institutional rivalries.They are protesting against bad policies that have delivered austerity, high unemployment and low investment. The system of checks and balances between EU institutions is out of whack, and this in turn contributed to bad policies. The commission and the parliament are the junior associates of the team, visible and loud, but in the wrong room.Is the power shift reversible? Until recently, I thought it might be. After the recent banking union fiasco, I am no longer so confident. The council agreed on legislation for a bank resolution fund in December. The legislation then duly moved to the parliament, and then to an inter-institutional conciliation process. That is where the parliament caved in. The draft of the legislation as originally agreed by the council had flaws. Many were irritating. One was fatal. It was the lack of a provision to deal with a contagious banking crisis, which was the whole point of the legislation. Germany ruled out any fiscal backstop, and the other ministers reluctantly accepted Berlin’s position.But why should the parliament have accepted it? Instead of challenging the council on this one important issue, it focused on the other, minor points of disagreement, such as who takes what decisions when and who is allowed take part in which meeting – all stuff that Brussels is obsessed with. When they won a few cosmetic concessions after 16 hours of negotiations, they declared victory. Several MEPs are now claiming that taxpayers no longer have to bail out banks. That is absolutely not true. For me, they lost their credibility at this moment.

And yet on paper, the parliament is becoming more important. One of the many changes agreed in the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 is parliament’s new right to vote for the next commission president. This is why the parties have appointed their Spitzenkandidaten – their candidates for the job. If the outcome would be a more focused and more forward-looking commission, then good.

I am just not sure that this will happen. My expectation is that ultimate power will remain with the council because of the political dynamics in the EU. I fear Mr Van Rompuy is right. Those European elections are sadly not all that important.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.